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IV. James Mill's Politics: The ‘Essay on Government’ and the Movement for Reform1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

William Thomas
William Thomas
Affiliation:
Christ Church, Oxford
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Extract

The Benthamites or Utilitarians are often held to have been at least partly responsible for the Reform Act of 1832. To historians who make this attribution, Bentham's own writings have not been a help. They are generally too abstract and difficult to have been popular; and where (as in the Parliamentary Reform Catechism) they have an avowed practical purpose, they are at once too detailed and too extreme to be easily related to practical legislation. James Mill, on the other hand, claimed to be disciple of Bentham, held administrative office, and wrote short tracts which are known to have circulated among a whole generation of young liberals in the 1820s.2

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , June 1969 , pp. 249 - 284
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1969

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References

2 Roebuck told Brougham on Mill's death, ‘He was my political and philosophical teacher. To him I owe greater obligations than to any other man.’ Brougham MSS., University College, London, 29 06 1836Google Scholar. See also Grote, G., Minor Works (1873), p. 284.Google Scholar

3 Autobiography (World's Classics ed.) p. 88.

4 I have used throughout the bound and undated edition of Mill's Essays circulated about 1825. This seems to have been the text as it was propagated. Strictly speaking, what I have called for convenience the Essay on Government should be given the more awkward title The Article, ‘Government’.

5 Macaulay, T.B., Miscellaneous Writings (1860), 1, 282–395;Google ScholarLewis's, G.C.criticism is in his On the Use and Abuse of Political Terms (2nd ed.Oxford, 1898), pp. 100–1.Google Scholar Lewis found the language of Mill's argument for representative government ‘somewhat perplexed’.

6 ‘ Halévy, E., The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (English tr. Mary Morris, 1928), pp. 264Google Scholar and 420–31. For a Marxist use of Halévy see Simon, B., Studies in the History of Education (1960), pp. 126–7.Google Scholar

7 ‘James Mill on Universal Suffrage and the Middle Class’ in J[ournal] of P[olitics], xxiv, no. 1 (1962), 167–90.Google Scholar

8 Hamburger, J.D., James Mill and the Art of Revolution (Yale, 1963), pp. 20–23Google Scholar. See also the same writer's Intellectuals in Politics: J. S. Mill and the Philosophic Radicals (Yale, 1965).Google Scholar

9 Macaulay, op. cit. pp. 309–10; Lewis, op. cit. p. 101.

10 E.g. Hobsbawm, E.J., The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (1962), pp. 185Google Scholar (where the Essay on Government is misdated), and 236 ff.

11 J. of P.p. 181.

12 Halévy, Philosophic Radicalism, p. 251.

13 Autobiography, p. 87.

14 Essay on Government, p. 4.

15 Ibid. p. 5.

16 Ibid. p. 12.

17 Essay on Government, pp. 13–16.

18 Ibid. pp. 16–17.

18 Ibid. p. 17.

20 Ibid. p. 16.

21 Ibid. p. 18.

22 Ibid. p. 18.

23 An opinion more rarely expressed as the price of seats rose.

24 Essay on Government, pp. 19–20.

25 Essay on Government, p. 21.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid. Italics mine.

31 Ibid. p. 23.

32 Essay on Government, pp. 27–8,31–2. I think Mill must be cleared of the charge of praising in this passage a rising bourgeoisie. Dr Winch has pointed out in his James Mill: Selected Economic Writings (1966), pp. 13–14, 195, that Mill's arguments on this point are sociological rather than economic ones. I think however that Mill's phrase ‘the middle rank’ shows that he was drawing on an ancient classical idea which is a commonplace of eighteenth-century literature. He means what Robinson Crusoe's father called ‘the upper station of low life’, those neither so rich as to be corrupted by their wealth nor so needy as to be brutalized by labour. He is less concerned with their economic function than with their role as the source of most artistic and intellectual endeavour. Cf. Aristotle's Politics, 1295b–1296a, and Mill's Elements of Political Economy (1821), pp. 48–9 (Winch, op. cit. pp. 241–2).

33 Misc. Writings, 1, 310–11.

34 Halévy, Philosophic Radicalism, pp. 422–7.

35 Bain, A., James Mill (1882), p. 461Google Scholar, and Bowring., J., The Works of Jeremy Bentham (1843), x, 450.Google Scholar

36 Cf. Hamburger, J. of P. xxiv, no. 1, 169–71.

37 Sraffa, P. (ed.) Works of David Ricardo (Cambridge, 1952), vi, 61, Malthus to Ricardo, 20 10. 1811.Google Scholar

38 Misc. Writings, 1, 284–5.

39 Essay on Government, pp. 4, 5.

40 Ibid. pp. 8, 10 14.

41 Eustace Conway (1834), 1, 83–4.Google Scholar

42 Mill's biographer Bain was preoccupied with the secular influences in his subject's Scottish background, with, to quote his table of contents, the ‘Metaphysicians in the neighbourhood’. For a corrective of Bain, see Mrs Letwin's sensitive study, The Pursuit of Certainty (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 191–202.Google Scholar

43 W[estminster] R[eview], 1, no. 1 (01. 1824), 208–9.Google Scholar

44 J. R. M'Culloch to Macvey Napier, 25 June 1829, Napier MSS., B.M. Add. MSS. 34,614, fol. 125.

45 Annual Review, VII (1808), 102Google Scholar, review of Fox's History of James II.

46 See for instance his distrust for ‘the method of induction’ in his review of Comber in Eclectic Review, v (01. 1809), 52–3;Google Scholar and his conception of the ‘principle stages’ of civilization in his review of de Guignes in E[dinburgh] R[eview], xiv, no. 28 (07 1809), 413–14.Google Scholar Mill's reliance on the narratives of Bruce, Malcolm and Macpherson would repay further study.

47 Mill to Napier, 23 Oct. 1816, Add. MSS. 34,612, fols. 161–2, and Selections from the Correspondence of Macvey Napier, ed. Napier, M. (1879), p. 17.Google Scholar

48 Mill to Ricardo, 19 Oct. 1817, Sraffa, vii, 195–6. He later hoped that it would convert Ricardo to the view that ‘legislation is essentially a science the effects of which may be computed with an extraprdinary degree of certainty’. Ibid. p. 211 (3 Dec. 1817).

49 Essay on Education, p. 12; reprinted in Cavenagh, F.A. (ed.), James and John Stuart Mill on Education (Cambridge, 1936), p. 16.Google Scholar

50 As a proof that Mill deliberately ‘blunted’ his own argument, Professor Hamburger offers Mill's remark to Napier that he would ‘say nothing capable of alarming even a whig’. But he does not quote the rest of Mill's letter, which reads: ‘…and he is more terrified at the principles pf good government than the worst of Tories. I would undertake to make Mr. Canning a convert to the principles of good government, sooner than your lord Grey & your Sir James Mackintosh; & I have now [since Mill's appointment to the India House] an opportunity of speaking with some knowledge of Canning.' This was why Mill chose as his text for the discussion of the theory of representation by interests, not Mackintosh's Edinburgh Review article, but a speech to the same effect by Lord Liverpool—a quaint way of ‘converting’ Canning, but consistent with what we know of Mill's faith in reasoned argument. Mill to Napier, 10 Sept. 1819, Add. MSS. 34,612, fol. 287, and Hamburger, J., J. of P. xxiv, no. 1, 1717, and Intellectuals in Politics, p. 37.Google Scholar

51 Sraffa, VIII, 261. Ricardo to Trower, 22 Mar. 1818, where Ricardo anticipates Mill's argument for representation; p. 273, same to same, 27 June 1818, where Ricardo mentions his collaboratipn with Mill; p. 301, Mill to Ricardo, 23 Sept. 1818, mentioning Ricardo's two discourses on Reform and Ballot being prepared for Mill's eyes; p. 321, Ricardo to Trower, 2 Nov. 1818, where Ricardo sketches the argument concerning sinister interests.

52 Sraffa, VIII, 210––13, Ricardo to Mill, 27 July 1820. By ‘the good cause’ which the Essay would serve, it seems not too extravagant to suppose that both men meant simply ‘good government’. See Sraffa, VIII, 301, Mill to Ricardo 23 Sept. 1818, and cf. Hamburger, J. of P. XXIV, no. i, 169 n.

53 The Traveller, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 April 1821.

54 Preface to separate edition of the Essay, p. 1.

55 Mill to M'Culloch, J.R., 18 08 1825, Nat. Lib. of Scotland, MS. 673, fols. 53–5.Google Scholar

56 Portarlington.

57 W.R. IV, no. 7, 201. Though this article is not usually attributed to Mill, the style is unmistakably his, and his authorship is to my mind proved by the many quotations in vol. I of his Commonplace Book (unfol. London Library) which occur also in the article, notably that from ‘old Selden’ on p. 217. One is not surprised that John Mill omitted this example of his father's contributions from his list in the Autobiography, p. 81.

58 Ibid. p. 202.

59 Ibid. p. 220.

60 Ibid. Italics mine.

61 Ibid. pp. 218–19.

62 E.R. XXXI, no. 61, 175.

63 Ibid. p. 183.

64 Essay on Government, p. 26.

65 W.R. IV, no. 7, 215.

66 Sraffa, vn, no. Mill to Ricardo, 16 Dec. 1816.

67 E.R. XXXI, no. 61, 184–5.

68 W.R. IV, no. 7, 224ff.

69 W.R. IV, no 7, pp. 223, 227.

70 Ibid. pp. 227–8.

71 E.R. XLVI, no. 91 (June, 1827), 261. Article on ‘The Present Administration’. Macaulay's quarrel with Brougham may have originated in the fact that in the following number Brougham wrote an article (‘State of Parties’, pp. 415–32) apologizing for what Macaulay had written. For Macaulay's own account of the matter see Trevelyan, G.O., Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (1876), i, 186–8.Google Scholar

72 W.R. VI, no. 12 (Oct. 1826), p. 272. Article on ‘The State of the Nation.’

73 W.R. 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1824), 211, review of E.R. For Mill's later variants on this definition of aristocracy cf. W.R. 11, no. 1 (Jan. 1825), 210–11, review of Southey's ‘Book of the Church’ and London Review, II (01. 1836), 283–306.Google Scholar

74 J. L. Mallet, quoted in Winch, James Mill's Economic Writings, p. 193.

75 Statement of the Question of Parliamentary Reform (1821), pp. 32–3.

76 B.M. Add. MSS. 29,529, fols. 35–6.

77 Extract from a lecture delivered in Nov. 1829 quoted by Examiner, 28 Dec. 1830, p. 817. This seems to be the subject of an undated letter from Austin to Chadwick (then assistant to Fonblanque the editor) in Bentham MSS., University College, London.

78 Misc. Writings, 1, 316.

79 J. S. Mill, Autobiography, p. 100.

80 Parl[iamentary] Hist[ory and] Rev[iew], 1 (1825), 1. The author of the preface seems likely to have been Peregrine Bingham, already editor of Bentham's Political Fallacies.

81 Parl. Hist. Rev. 1, 4.

82 Parl. Hist. Rev. II (1826), 784, and W.R. vol. VI, no. 12 (Oct. 1826), 226–7.

83 Parl. Hist. Rev. II, 683–4.

84 Parl. Hist. Rev. 1, 630.

85 Grote, G., Minor Works (1873), pp. 46–7.Google Scholar See also Examiner, 24 Apr. 1831, pp. 257–8, for a comment on Gascoyne's motion that the numbers of the House of Commons should not be reduced.

86 W.R. IV, no. 7 (July 1825), 215; for a repetition of the arguments of the Essay, see pp. 196–202.

87 The copy of the Review in the London University Library has some MS. notes on authors of vol. 1 (1825) in Grote's hand; and in 11 (1826) pencilled initials in that of Mrs Grote. The contributors noted are Bingham, Walter Coulson, Charles and John Austin, John Mill and his father and ‘Dr. Roget’. James Mill's contributions were to the second and third numbers, and gave much less attention to the content of Debates than those of the other contributors, his references in vol. I being to Hansard, and not to debates in the preceding part of the volume, as with other contributors.

88 Parl. Hist. Rev. II, 762–3.

89 Parl. Hist. Rev. II, 772–3.

90 Ibid. pp. 774, 781. But the section from §2, p. 779 to the end of §1 on p. 781 seems to be in a different hand and is certainly in a different style to Mill's.

91 Ibid. p. 782.

92 Ibid. p. 734 (vol. 1), 791 and 777.

93 Parl. Hist. Rev. II, p. 790.

94 ‘Constitutional Legislation', Parl. Hist. Rev. III, 335–74.

95 P[arliamentary] D[ebates], xvII, 1215, 11 June 1827.

96 Parl. Hist. Rev. III, 342.

97 Ibid. p. 344.

98 Parl. Hist. Rev. III, p. 356.

99 Parl. Hist. Rev. II, 765.

100 Ibid. p. 767.

101 P.D. XVII, 1211 (11 June 1827).

102 P.D. XVIII, 1290 (21 Mar. 1828).

103 P.D. XVII, 1049 (28 May 1827).

104 Misc. Writings, 1, 357–8.

105 Parliamentary Reform Catechism, in Works (ed. Bowring), III, 433 ff.

106 Above, p. 252.

107 Parl. Hist. Rev. III, 344.

108 W.R. IV, no. 7 (July, 1825), 224–5.

109 Commonplace Book, 1 (London Library).

110 Parl. Hist. Rev. 1,604. Italics mine.

111 Ibid. p. 606.

112 Ibid. p. 620.

113 Reynolds, J.A., The Catholic Emancipation Crisis in Ireland, 1823–1829 (New Haven, 1954). P. 168.Google Scholar

114 In Examiner, 19 Nov. 1826, p. 739, the Utilitarians are given a qualified support; by 22 Apr. 1827, p. 245, the Parliamentary History and Review is praised ‘though avowedly grounded on Utilitarian principles'; by 4 Jan. 1828 (p. 1) the propagation of Utilitarian principle is more dogmatic; and by 5 Apr. 1829, p.210 Fonblanque had allowed a Utilitarian to review Scott, with disastrous results. Fonblanque called one of his sons Jeremy Bentham Fonblanque.

115 Examiner, 12 Aug. 1827, p. 498.

116 Ibid. 13 July 1828, p. 450.

117 Ibid. 1 June 1828, p. 353.

118 Ibid. 31 Aug. 1828, p. 561, reprinted in Fonblanque, A., England Under Seven Administrations (1836), 1, 175–8.Google Scholar

119 Examiner, 7 Sept. 1828, p. 577. For this election see J. A. Reynolds, op. cit. pp. 98–9. 18

120 Examiner, 26 Oct. 1828, p. 689.

121 Ibid. 2 Nov. 1828, p. 705.

122 Ibid. 8 Feb. 1829, p. 81.

123 Ibid. 8 Mar. 1829, p. 145.

124 P.D. n.s. XX, 763–72, and Examiner, 8 Mar. 1829, p. 145.

125 W.R. X, no. 20 (April 1829), 525 and Thompson, T.P., Exercises, Political & Others (1842–3), 1, 84.Google Scholar Hume had opposed disfranchisement on 9 May 1825. P.D. 2nd ser. XIII, 401–66,

126 Examiner, 5 Apr. 1829, p. 209.

127 P.D. n. 5. XXI, 1686–8.

128 Examiner, 7 June 1829, p. 352.

129 Brougham to Jeffrey, 12 May 1829, Brougham MSS., University College, London.

130 Examiner, 17 Feb. 1828, pp. 98–9. In spite of which the attacks increased in bitterness through the year.

131 Examiner, 25 Oct. 1829, pp. 673–4; reprinted in Seven Administrations, 1, 233–42, where, however, this paragraph is omitted.

132 Morning Chronicle, quoted in Examiner, 19 July 1829, p. 449 and Spectator, 18 July 1829, p. 454.

133 Misc. Writings, 1, 307.

134 Morn. Chron., quoted in Examiner, 13 Sept. 1829, p. 577.

135 Examiner, 5 July 1829, p. 418. For Thompson's reaction to the letter, see L. G. Johnson, General T. P. Thompson (1957), pp. 155–7.

136 Examiner, 19 July 1829, p. 449.

137 Ibid. 27 Sept. 1829, pp. 609–10.

138 Ibid. 22 Nov. 1829, pp. 737–8.

139 Both papers gave particularly sensational treatment to the case of the murderer William Corder and that of Burke and Hare. Spectator, 16 Aug. 1829, pp. 104–5; Examiner, 15 Mar. 1829, p. 163, and 2 Aug. 1829, p. 482.

140 Misc. Writings, 1, 313.

141 Cf. Examiner, 5 July 1829, p. 417; 21 Feb. 1830, p. 112; 28 Mar. 1830, pp. 193–4; 6 June 1830, p. 354.

142 Examiner, 25 Oct. 1829, P. 673, and Seven Administrations, 1, 237.

143 Ibid. 14 Mar. 1820, pp. 161–2.

144 Ibid.31 Jan. 1830, pp. 68, 70–1.

145 Ibid. 9 Aug. 1829, p. 497.

146 Ibid. 6 June 1830, p. 354.

147 Ibid. 25 July 1830, p. 467.

148 W.R. XII, no. 25 (July, 1830), p. 8.

149 Ibid. p. 7

150 Ibid. p. 12.

150 Ibid. p. 10.

152 W.R. XIII, no. 25 (July, 1830), p. 17.

153 Ibid. pp. 37–9.

154 Examiner, 11 July 1830, p. 436.

155 At a meeting at the Crown and Anchor of the Friends of Parliamentary Reform, reported in Examiner, 18 July 1830, pp. 449–50.

156 Examiner, 3 Oct. 1830, p. 627.

157 Ibid. 19 Sept. 1830, pp. 593–4.

158 To judge by vol. 1 of his Commonplace Book (London Library), James Mill was familiar with Burke's views on a members' duty to his constituents; but he thought of Burke not as a tory, as we tend to, but as an inconsistent whig.